'I've seen it all': LGBTI elders come back out at the ball

They arrived in sequins and feathers, six-inch heels and pancake makeup. They arrived, too, in T-shirts and hiking boots, frocking up for no one. There were walking sticks and wheelchairs, a blind man with a guide dog, a woman with a shirt saying “This is what an old lesbian looks like”. This was their night, and they’d come as they please.

In the midst of a survey on same-sex marriage that feels to many like a judgment on the equality of gays and lesbians, here was a night to celebrate those who had come of age when “in the closet” was all but compulsory.

Here were people who remembered when homosexuality was illegal, when transgender people were shunned, who had come out when it was an act of courage, who had nursed the dying through the scourge of Aids.

All photographs by Meredith O’Shea for the Guardian

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The inaugural Coming Back Out Ball at Melbourne’s Town Hall on Saturday night was for LGBTI elders, a dinner and concert hosted by the redoubtable Robyn Archer, with singers, musicians and performers serenading the oldies. For the over 65s, it was free.

Tristan Meecham, the artistic director of the performance group All the Queens Men, worked for two years to make this happen. He stood on a stage in a sharp suit and towering platform shoes.

“I stand before you as a young gay man,” he said.

“We offer this night as a gift in appreciation and respect for all you have done … for fighting for my right to wear these six-inch heels and nail polish.”

She noted that in November, she and Prince Philip will have been married for 70 years and if “Lizzie can marry, lezzies can marry”. Indeed, LGBTI truly stood for “Let God Bless the Queen, Intermittently”.

Cowboys in pink hats and tight shorts strutted their stuff. Carlotta, a “74-year-old boiler”, said she had fought for equality since opening the cabaret show Les Girls in 1963. “I’ve seen it all,” she sang, “and I’m still here.”

There was poignancy throughout, a tender acknowledgment that amid the diversity, all of them had had publicly “come out” at some point, painfully or otherwise. The shadow of the same-sex marriage survey was the thread, the latest skirmish in a long struggle for equality.

Indigenous soprano Deborah Cheetham, in full blowsy opera gown, was accompanied by her partner Toni Lalich. She raised the roof with an adapted rendition of Don’t Cry for Me Argentina: “A message for Cory and Tony and Lyle/ I just want you to know I don’t hate you at all/ I can’t be bothered/ This truth is, I’m tired of waiting/ Our love is equal, or may be more so/ When you say yes Australia, I’ll marry my darling Toni.”

Getting old as an LGBTI person can be lonesome. Aged care facilities are catching up, but there remains discrimination and misunderstanding. Transgender seniors can feel isolated and fearful. For one night at least, this was one community.

“It feels like coming home,” said Liz Craig, 69, a nurse for 50 years. “I’m just overwhelmed with joy and pride.”

“It’s wonderful,” said David Morrison, 87. “I had no idea it would be like this.”

As the DJ played Young Hearts Run Free, Liz and her friends took to the dancefloor. Old they may be, but not past it. They bopped until the end, until the last song. It was We Are Family, and on this night, it was perfect.

David Morrison, 87

When David Morrison’s wife Margaret died 11 years ago, his daughter Anne-Marie asked him, “Dad, are you gay?”

“I said yes.” Morrison was in his mid-70s and had lived a life of secrecy and shame. On Saturday night, he was a gay elder celebrated at the Coming Back Out Ball, a slight dapper man with a hearing aid, red bow tie and a pocket handkerchief.

He took off his uniform and he had the most beautiful body … I was flabbergasted

David Morrison

Morrison recalls his life with no bitterness. He was born in depression-era Melbourne to devout Catholic parents. Sex was never spoken about. Homosexuality was unheard of. He remembers as a young man being aloof, a little different, but he never understood why.

“I had a couple of infatuations about guys, never about girls,” he says. “But it never occurred to me, I hadn’t heard of homosexuality. I thought I was the only one.

“It was hurting me terribly because I was so full of guilt. Hormones were raging, and here am I, just about every week going to confession to confess my sins. It was pathetic. I was wanking off and that was a mortal sin. I could go to hell for that and that’s what I believed.”

Yet Morrison loved the Catholic church, the hierarchy of it, the rituals, the colour, the shape it gave his life. At aged 19, he started training to become a Catholic brother in New South Wales. He left before his training was complete because it didn’t feel right and joined the air force in 1952 as an instrument fitter. “I liked the air force, there were all these men there.”

He remembers seeing an air force colleague undressing. “He took off his uniform and he had the most beautiful body. I was struck, I was flabbergasted, I had to look away.”

Morrison was a 34-year-old virgin when he married a strict Catholic woman, Margaret. The couple had two daughters.

“It was a disaster,” he says. “What I thought marriage would be was not that at all. As a man, I would have liked to have sex for sex’s sake, but she wasn’t a soul mate, you know. I loved Margaret, I would give my life for her but we were unsuited to each other.”

In the 1980s, he learned about the Aids epidemic and applied to be trained to help people with HIV. “My wife hated the idea, she could sense something.” He had a discreet affair with a man.

After Margaret died, Morrison began living openly as a gay man. He met Colin about four years ago. They were both elderly by then, and they had lunch together, even cutting each other’s hair. “We might play around a bit,” he says, but mostly they were companions. Colin died a few weeks ago, so Morrison went to Saturday night’s ball alone.

“I realise that no matter what, I’ve come out OK, all is forgiven,” he says. “I have no regrets, no thought of revenge. I did what I thought was OK, Margaret did, my parents did, too. I have all the money I need, a house, two daughters and five grandchildren.”

If same-sex marriage was legal, he doesn’t think it would appeal to him, even if he were a younger man.

“I voted emphatically yes [in the postal survey], but it’s not for me. Ideally, I think I’d have gone for a few partners. Even when I go into town now, there’s some wonderful looking men around.”

Liz Craig, 69

Young Australians know little about the horrors of the Aids epidemic that began in the early 1980s, but Liz Craig remembers it. Craig was a nurse with the Royal District Nursing Service, which even in the anxious early days cared for patients with HIV, the virus that can lead to Aids.

She remembers the fear of being infected. Ambulance workers were reluctant to pick up patients, people were frightened of hugging a patient with HIV or Aids, or kissing them, or sharing a glass of water with them. The nurses had a code for HIV – A100 they called it – because people feared the repercussions if it was acknowledged. She remembers the prejudice.

When I was little, sex was never talked about

Liz Craig

“This was seen as a gay disease,” Craig says. “I had nurses who would not care for them because it was God’s punishment. If you had anal sex you deserved HIV.”

For Craig, working with HIV patients was a way to serve her LGBTI community after a long personal journey. The childhoods of many older gays and lesbians – and heterosexuals – were imbued with sexual ignorance. For many too, the church was the dominate moral influence and it too instilled fear.

Craig came by boat from England to Australia in 1950 when she was 11. Her parents were 10-pound Poms, and Craig and her two sisters grew up above a hairdressing shop in Camberwell in Melbourne. Her parents were devout Church of England worshippers, “very strict and incredibly religious”.

“I never thought about it when I was little, sex was never talked about, never. God could see everything, if you masturbated God could see that,” she says.

“Even just personal things, like having your period, you were told that you had become a woman, but you weren’t told what that was. That was how it was in the day.”

Nursing training at the old Austin hospital was a “very steep learning curve” and a lasting one. She still sees the women she trained with 50 years ago. Life proceeded in a conventional way. She started dating a man and they got married. They had a daughter, Rebecca.

“Somewhere along the line,” she says, “I was unhappy in my marriage. Somewhere in my life I thought that maybe I would like to be with a woman. I toed and froed a bit. A lot of married people do, but I found with women I had a spiritual connection that was very important to me.”

The couple separated, not because of her sexuality, but because they had grown apart. She had a relationship with a woman, but then married a second time because “I tried to conform with my family”.

The marriage was difficult and she separated again. When Rebecca was around 18, Craig told her that she was a lesbian. “I came out, and never went back.

“Rebecca was pretty pissed off. She was my joy, still is, she’s everything to me. I think she was a bit jealous; how could another woman be in my life? I was her woman, mother daughter stuff, but she quickly came around and she’s been my mainstay.”

Craig is wary of being categorised. “I don’t think about myself as any label at all. I love the person I love, but I prefer to be with a woman.”

Her longest relationship with a woman lasted 10 years and it was “soul-destroying” when it ended. She wants same-sex marriage to be legalised, but has little interest in it personally. “I was asked to get married by a woman, and I said ‘No, I don’t believe in the institution of marriage’. It’s not that I love that person any less, but why do I need that piece of paper?”

If same-sex marriage is legalised, though, she’d love to be a marriage celebrant.

The drive for same-sex marriage could never have happened if gays had not fought to be treated as equal during the Aids crisis, she says. “I’ve seen young men die because they’re gay and have HIV and because their parents disowned them – some of them didn’t want to know they had HIV or Aids. I’ve seen young people die on their own which is soul-destroying.

“I know all the things they fought for – confidentiality, more drugs, help in the community, housing.

“We have been the forefathers to set this road for same-sex marriage. There would have been no such thing without us doing the hard work.”

Gordon Wilson, 81

Gordon Wilson always knew he was gay. When he was a boy in Western Australia he loved dancing – anything with Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire – and wanted to learn ballet. At 14, he asked his father, Richard, a survivor of the Burma railway during the second world war, if he could take lessons.

“And Dad said, ‘everybody will call you a sissy’. I said, ‘I am, so what?’ So Dad said, ‘OK, off you go’.” His parents were always supportive of him. His sister set up a Facebook group recently to encourage family and friends to vote yes in the same-sex marriage postal survey. “I’ve had a charmed life,” he says.

If anybody comes to me and says they are gay, I say ‘you will have a great life'. All you have to do is accept yourself

Gordon Wilson

Not that it was an easy life. Wilson was bullied at school – “I fought back and they left me alone”. He was badly beaten in the early 1960s by a group of young men in Melbourne and his damaged right eye is a permanent reminder of it.

But mostly, Wilson remembers a fabulous scene in the 1960s. There was the Hotel Australia and the London Hotel in the city and if there wasn’t a party at one of them, you’d go around the corner to the other.

“The cultural life was booming,” he says. “Every generation thinks they’re the first ones to do it, but excuse me, we’ve all done it all before. [Homosexuality] was still illegal, we were criminals, but we had some huge parties.

“American war ships came in and we entertained the sailors and they entertained us back on board for lunch.”

Wilson worked at bars and in retail, and for 23 years at the Victorian Aids Council. He recalls handing out thousands of safe sex packs during the HIV epidemic in the 1980s, and he cared for many dying gay men.

“One of them I was with quite a while and I had to sit with him while he died, which was fine, I could do it,” he says. “There were other people who were dying all around me and I was going to funerals. One of the guys at the council said to me, ‘Gordon, you’re getting to the end of your tether, you need to see someone’ so I went and saw a wonderful counsellor.”

He and his partner, George, were watching a news item some years ago about the possibility of same-sex marriage being passed in Australia.

“I just turned to him and said, ‘If we could get married, would you marry me?’ Without a blink of an eye he said, ‘Yes of course’. I said righto, OK. It was just out of the blue. You don’t have to get married but you have a right to get married.”

Wilson has some advice for young gay people. “If anybody comes to me at 14 or 15 and says they are gay, I would say ‘You will have a great life. All you have to do is accept yourself, and everything will be fine.’ And it’s true, self-acceptance is the big thing.”

Trace Williams

Trace Williams “never declares her age to anyone”, but she is an intersex elder, a person born at a time when the idea of a newborn who was neither obviously male nor female was terrifying for parents and doctors.

Her life has had more than its share of pain, but resilience is there, too. She strides into the Coming Back Out Ball, tall and lanky, dressed in black boots, fishnet stockings and short shorts, the fringe of her long hair dyed pink. As she says, she’s “just Trace” now, and comfortable with that.

My father was very bitter towards me, and because of that I ended up in a children’s home

Trace Williams

She was born in Ballarat in country Victoria to a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. She was named Graeme, undergoing operations to make her appear more like a boy, and prescribed male hormones in adolescence.

“My family’s attitude was not very kind,” she says. “My father was very bitter towards me, and because of that I ended up in a children’s home in Ballarat. My relationship with my mother was very strained.

“When my father passed away, I actually found cards that related to me, which said things like, ‘So disappointed that you didn’t get your little girl. Sorry, Hal, but you got an ‘it’.’

“As long as you had one Y chromosome you were assigned a male [gender]. It didn’t matter what genitalia you had. I was bought up as a boy because I had chromosomes that were different to the standard male or female, but there was a Y chromosome in there and that’s what they did in those days.”

The trauma of growing up as intersex a generation ago is there in Trace’s voice. It’s a story of sexual abuse, of a childhood as a state ward, of involvement with the juvenile justice system, of cruelty at work and mental health problems. It was striving to be yourself as an intersex person in a country town.

In the LGBTI alphabet, “I” is for intersex, but Williams wonders if it should be “invisible”. People with an intersex condition can be misunderstood within the queer community and still face legal hurdles and medical intrusion.

In March this year, Williams was one of more than 20 intersex advocates from Australia and New Zealand who met and developed a declaration of policy goals. The Darlington Statement, as it is known, had as its centrepiece the prohibition on surgery to alter the sex characteristics of infants and children without consent unless it is medically necessary.

“The norm for intersex people is that they are struggling all their lives to be recognised, that they are no different from any other person. But because of the way they are, they have special health needs and those health needs are not being met,” she says.

Williams now lives as a woman with her partner Jane Dodge. She doesn’t feel defined by being intersex and has managed to succeed in life, becoming financially independent along the way. The couple are setting up a hotel and art gallery in country Victoria. Williams knows that she can be mistaken for a trans woman, but it doesn’t worry her.

“I’m not into the stereotypes like John and Betty,” she says. “I really like this person [Jane] for who she is. Jane is Jane and Trace is Trace. If someone has a problem with me, it’s their problem.”

Nance Peck, 76

“I always say to people I’m BC and BS. They say, ‘what’s that?’ I say, ‘before contraception’ and ‘before superannuation’.”

Nance Peck defies stereotypes. She was born in Bundaberg in Queensland in 1940, “came out” as a lesbian in the 1970s, and now she’s not so sure.

The only man who I had really good sex with, he turned out years later to be gay as well – we laughed ourselves silly

Nance Peck

At the age of 76, in an era of gender fluidity, she prefers to think of herself as “non-binary”. In part, it’s to defy the attitudes towards the elderly, to “break out of the box”. She lifts her hat to show that her hair is grey, and says how much she resents the assumptions as she gets older that she’s a compliant “granny”.

“Change is happening,” she says. “One of the reason why I decided to come out of my comfort zone and speak now that I’m not in paid work is that I’ve still got an overactive brain. I have to do something with it, so I’ve decided I’m a thinker.”

Peck’s family was poor and her father beat her. She was an angry child and poured her energies into sport. She was known as a “tomboy” but never thought about sexuality.

“I was born in the time of ignorance is what I call it, “she says. “I didn’t know you got periods until I got them, and I didn’t recover from the shock of that for quite a while.

“I didn’t really find out about sexuality until the 1960s when I went to Sydney. In the 1970s, it was mandatory to try everything. And I thought I’m not going to die a shrivelled up old prune, so I tried all the different things, groups and all sorts of stuff.

“The only man who I had really good sex with, he turned out years later to be gay as well – we laughed ourselves silly.”

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Peck left school at 15 and joined the public service and later, the Queensland police in 1965, a pioneering woman in the force. She later put herself through year 12 studies and university. Before she retired, she worked with community legal centres in Melbourne, particularly on domestic violence and prison reform.

The last few years have seen crushing health problems, and a struggle to work out a way to slow down a little, while still contributing.

She has had lung cancer and major surgery, but remains an activist. Her oldest friend, Trisha, asked her once whether she would always be a radical. “I said ‘I hope so’.

“The last few years of life has been about learning to have the same energy about life and politics and the world and thinking and how to slow it down. I’m training myself to be slower and she [Trisha] said, ‘I’d like to see that’.”

• This article was amended on 11 October 2017 to correct the name of Carlotta, from Carlotto as an earlier version said.